Movie Reaction: Dark Waters

Formula: Erin Brockovich - sunlight

When it comes to people as movie and Hollywood-obsessed as me, I'm pretty far on the pro-capitalist end of the spectrum. I'm a free market-stan. That said, corporations scare the hell out of me. I've worked for a large company for nearly a decade, and I'm constantly amazed that any company larger that 100 people doesn't crumble after a week. Virtually everything in any corporate structure is held together by pins and duct tape. What really scares me about companies (that's also the reason they are able to accomplish anything) is their limited liability status. You can't arrest a company. If a company is sufficiently large, it can disperse the blame for anything so effectively that no one every suffers punishment for their actions. The same goes for government, but that's a discussion for another day. One of those things that, to get through the day, I just have to try and not think about is that there's almost nothing the "little guy" can do to fight a company that did him wrong. So, Dark Waters is the kind of movie that keeps me up at night.

Dark Waters is about the long legal fight against DuPont over the hazardous effects of making Teflon. It starts when a corporate defense lawyer in Cincinnati played by Mark Ruffalo is approached by a West Virginia farmer (Bill Camp) who knows his grandmother. The farmer's cattle have been dying at alarming rates. Ruffalo's initial curiosity leads to a big coverup by DuPont, and pretty much the rest of the movie is Ruffalo fighting to expose the truth while DuPont buries him in paperwork and legal technicalities.

This is a "people doing their damn job movie", which is a genre I've grown fond of in recent years. There's nothing particularly flashy about the movie. It's just Ruffalo fighting small battle after small battle in hopes that it will eventually enact change. Two steps forward, one step back. It's an inspiring movie in the sense that it's nice to know there are people out there who haven't given up and who are willing to deal with all the bullshit involved in fixing the system from within.

By design though, it's a punishing movie. Everything visually is intended to suck the life out of you. Ruffalo physically falls apart throughout the movie. It's always overcast outside. The color palette is muted and dark. It's not a pretty movie to look at. I think it's very well shot. They just aren't aiming for something pleasant.

The performances aren't great. Ruffalo mutes every bit of charisma he has and manners himself to be as unremarkable as possible. I barely feel like I know his character by the end. Anne Hathaway plays Ruffalo's wife, and it's a thankless part. Her main function is to ask why he's so obsessed with this case. It's not quite a nagging wife role, but it's not far from it. Bill Camp has a gruff country accent that he really commits to. Sadly, it veers into being cartoonish. Tim Robbins has a dynamite speech as one of Ruffalo's partners at the law firm, but there was something about it that felt like he was one bad line read away from falling apart. I was surprised how little I liked the performances, because that was the strength of director Todd Haynes' 2015 film, Carol.

I did appreciate the work that went into the screenplay (with an assist from the direction and editing, I'm sure). This is a dense movie, tasked with covering over a decade of mostly uneventful events, but I was never bored by it. Haynes keeps it tense. I was desperate for every small win. Even when I could tell the screenplay was overselling something, going overboard with how nefarious DuPont's executive were, I could see the story function of it.

It's hard to call Dark Waters a movie I liked. It did sort of ruin the rest of the day for me. It's an effective and well made movie. It couldn't gotten a little more out of the performances. It's a good movie, although you do need to be in the right mood for it.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend